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Thursday, 31 October 2013

The Curious Tale of King Seqenenre Tao

This article was originally published in Al Rawi: Egypt's Heritage Review,issue 4 (2012). July 2009, Cairo.

The mummy is doing what mummies do best: lying
there motionless in its glass coffin, like Snow White waiting for a kiss. Standing
in the corner of the Egyptian Museum's Royal Mummy room, I watch throngs of
tourists filing past me, ooo-ing and aah-ing at the collection of corpses laid
out before them. Each rigid royal is protected in his own private,
environmentally controlled cocoon - islands of calm in a lively sea of loud
shorts, baseball caps, and fluorescent bikinis barely hidden beneath
transparent spaghetti-strap tops. The smell of cheap sunscreen and burnt skin
is palpable, it wafts behind bodies as they rush from case to case; the mummies,
on the other hand, have all the time in the world, they aren't going anywhere.

To my surprise, the tourists are
unmoved by the grim faces of death surrounding them. Perhaps it's the
mummies'antiquity that makes the
difference, or perhaps people just aren't as squeamish as I think. Would they be just as calm standing in a
morgue? I wonder, or would they be slightly
more freaked out? A young girl in a flowery dress sticks her tongue out in
disgust while her parents read aloud a nearby label, proclaiming the name of
the king lying below them.

'Seqenenre Tao,' the father says,
leaning over the glass. The mother shuffles closer and the child covers her
eyes; a single brown eye peeks out from behind tiny fingers. 'the guidebook
says that "Tao" means "the brave."' Unsurprisingly, this
particular mummy was generating a fair amount of attention. Unlike his neighbours,
who lie in poses of quiet serenity, his wizened arms are raised, one wrist is
twisted like a branch on a dying tree, his mouth is open in a final gasp of
agonized horror. Most strikingly, his skull is full of holes.

'I wonder what happened to him.'
The father says, before moving on to the next mummy in the queue, his purple flip
flops slapping against the Mummy Room's cold stone floor.

I go to stand over the mummy,
his body bundled in brown sheets like a newborn child, and gaze down at his
head wounds through the glass. There are five in total, but only four are
visible to museum-goers: a long horizontal cut slices across the top of his
forehead; a narrower wound is just above the right eyebrow; below his left eye
is a cut into the cheek; and a deep depression at the centre of his face marks
the strike of a blunt object, which destroyed the right eye socket; a fifth sharp
wound was inflicted below the left ear, perhaps by a dagger. A hole in the
right cheek looks as if it was caused by a further blow, but is actually the result
of the face collapsing after the trauma of the blunt blow to the nose.

A sweaty, hairy arm collides
with my own.

'Look at his funny teeth,' the man
remarks to his wife, his own teeth stained yellow from years of smoking. 'He
looks like he's eaten a sour sweet!'

'He doesn't look happy to see
us!' She says. I can't imagine he is,
I think, waiting for them to move along. For a few blessed moments, I again
have time to ponder the king's death in silence. Looking at his eternal
grimace, his crushed and vacant eye sockets, I wonder, what was the last thing you saw?

A Most Unusual Mummy

June 9th 1886, Cairo.

Gaston Maspero, head of Egyptian
Antiquities, stands over a wrapped body, its stiff shape lying outstretched on
a wooden table, its face unseen for thousands of years. Leaning forward to take
one last look at its pristine unwrapped form, his round glasses slip down his
nose, causing the white-wrapped corpse to glide out of focus. He pushes them
back, his upturned palms catching the bristles of his short white beard, and
stands back upright, thinking of the mummy's journey from birth to this very
moment; what twists of fate had brought this pharaoh to rest on his table in this
candlelit room, thousands of years after his death? All Maspero knows is that
the body, identified by inscriptions as Seqenenre Tao, had remained in storage,
cradled safely in its coffin, since 1881, when it had been found, along with
many of the great New Kingdom pharaohs, in a roughly cut tunnel at Deir
el-Bahri in Luxor. From there it had been transported along the Nile by
steamer, and brought to the Bulaq Museum in Cairo with the other royals for
investigation.

935
BC, Thebes.

The
priests of Amun place Seqenenre's anthropoid coffin into a roughly hewn rock
tomb at Deir el-Bahri, to rest alongside his New Kingdom successors. The great
royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings have been emptied, their treasures
re-used in these difficult times. Seqenenre's tomb, standing at Dra Abu el-Naga,
at the foot of the Theban hills, has been violated too, and his comparatively meagre
grave goods recycled. Before reburying Seqenenre, the priests strip his body of
all valuable amulets and jewellery (perhaps providing a further explanation as
to why he has such a look of horror on his face), and scrape the gilding from
his coffin. Despite their obvious impiety, however, the priests show Seqenenre
some courtesy. On the coffin, which was carved to resemble a mummified king,
they leave the name of the god Ptah-Sokar and the king's uraeus (a rearing
cobra worn at the forehead) untouched, and paint in yellow the parts of the
headdress and face where gilding had once been. Lost inscriptions are rewritten
in red ink, and a necklace is painted in blue across the coffin's chest. Other
places where the gold had been removed are covered in white gesso. Sealed in his new tomb, Seqenenre
is again left to his eternal slumber.

June
9th, 1886, Cairo.

Touching
the mummy's outer shroud, and then rubbing his first and forefingers against
his thumb, Maspero feels it greasy to the touch. As he begins to unravel the
linen strips, he is overpowered by a foul odour emanating from the body still hidden
within. This is the first sign that something is wrong; most mummies smell of
fragrant spices and oils. He peels away the layers with growing expectation,
one by one, placing them at his side on another table, to reveal a horrifying
face, its head pierced with cracks and holes, some caked with dribbles of brain
matter; each mutilation dances in circles in the light cast from his candle.
Remaining professional, he is unshaken by the sight, and continues his work in
silence. Removing all of the linen, he reveals the body of a tall man - at
least tall by ancient Egyptian standards - who was probably around forty at the
time of death. The mummy's chest is broken and the ribs have been hurriedly squeezed
together by the embalmers. Examining the arms, legs and vertebrae, Maspero
finds them disarticulated, and the pelvis in pieces. Worms have penetrated the
mummy's shrouds and the shells of beetle larvae are in the king's hair, as well
as all around the body. The king's entire left arm is stripped of soft tissue.
Completing his investigation, Maspero concludes that Seqenenre died in battle
fighting for his life against enemy combatants.

Early
1900s, Cairo.

Seqenenre
is again laid out on a table, this time in the recently built Egyptian Museum
at Tahrir Square, home to Egypt's precious Pharaonic antiquities since 1902. Grafton
Elliot Smith, an Australian anatomist, examines the royal body and makes
detailed notes on his findings, later to be published in his official catalogue
of the museum's royal mummies. Smith's careful examination reveals a complete
lack of wounds to the arms or any part of the king's body except for the head,
something confirmed in the 1970s when the mummy was x-rayed. Quite unusually, Smith
comments, no attempt had been made to put the body in the traditional royal
pose - arms crossed over the chest - and the king's heart had been removed. Smith
knows that this was against Egyptian tradition; the deceased needed his heart for
his judgement before Osiris, without it he'd be doomed for eternity. Smith then
looks at the angles of the wounds in Seqenenre's head. Most are horizontal, he notes, could
this mean that the king was lying down when he received them? Could he have
been assassinated when sleeping in his palace? But the poor quality of the
embalming, and the haste with which the embalmers had conducted their work,
suggests that Seqenenre had been mummified far from the Theban royal court.
Smith cannot suggest where specifically, but to Maspero it had meant only one
thing: that Seqenenre was embalmed close to the spot where he'd been slain,
close to a battlefield.

But how did Seqenenre end up on that battlefield? What events led him
to war?

Disintegration and Invasion

1700 BC.

Egypt's great Middle Kingdom, a time of
artistic creativity and strong centralized power, is in a state of collapse. For
much of the 13th Dynasty's tenure, Egypt's kings continued to rule from
Itj-Tawy, a now lost royal city, located somewhere just north of the Faiyum
Oasis. But as time progressed, cracks began to spider across the state's
fragile facade, its unity a weakening fiction of pressurized cohesion,
ultimately smashed by the power-hungry machinations of provincial leaders into fragments
of small, independent 'kingdoms.'

One of the first states to
separate centres on the city of Avaris (modern Tell el-Daba) in the northeast
Delta. It declares itself independent under a ruler named Nehesy, about whom
little is known. He is succeeded by a
series of ephemeral rulers, men known to us only through their names on tiny
faience scarabs. From reading these names, many appear to have been of Asiatic
descent rather than native Egyptians, no doubt the sons of Syrio-Palestinian
traders and prisoners of war, who'd settled in the north-eastern Delta during
the Middle Kingdom. By declaring themselves independent of the crown, these 'kings'
of Avaris cut off the 13th Dynasty pharaohs from their lucrative trade with
Palestine and beyond. Even worse, the weakening of royal power leads to the
loss of Egypt's control of Nubia, and the gold that lies in its deserts. Facing
threats across the Delta, the royal court flees to the relative safety of
Thebes, only to watch powerless as their country continues to fracture.

1650 BC.

The royal family has abandoned Itj-Tawy, leaving its
people in the hands of northern pretenders, and a plague strikes Avaris, the
corpses of its citizens thrown together to rot en masse. The spectre of death makes no distinction between social
classes; his cold hands touch Avaris' ruling elite too, leaving an even greater
power vacuum in the north. This provides the perfect opportunity for a new
group of Asiatics to cross the Sinai and occupy the city. To history, these
invaders become known as the Hyksos, a corruption of the Egyptian hekka khasut, 'the rulers of foreign
lands.' Armed with superior weaponry, from Avaris they swiftly expand their sphere
of influence across the Delta and down the Nile Valley, gaining the allegiance
of local Egyptian rulers as they march.

At first, the Hyksos advance
beyond Abydos in Middle Egypt and down into Thebes. There they face resistance
from the heirs of the 13th Dynasty. King Montuhotepi says that he 'drove back
all foreign lands' and rescued Thebes, while King Ikhernofret, an obscure ruler
normally absent from later king lists, makes similar claims, relating how he
caused Thebes to be protected 'when it had been immersed' and that he protected
it from the 'foreign lands.' These kings paint a picture of constant warfare,
of desperately defending their city from violent forces, and periods of famine.
Eventually, the Hyksos and the Thebans reach a compromise, agreeing to establish
their border at Cusae in Middle Egypt, modern El-Qusiya.

For a few decades, peace dominates;
that is, until Seqenenre ascends the throne.

Seqenenre's Life

1593 BC, Thebes.

In the seclusion of her birthing pavilion, Queen
Tetisherit gives birth to a boy, whom she names Tao, in honour of his father
King Senakhtenre Tao I. He is raised at the Theban royal court with his
sisters, Ahhotep, Inhapy, and Satdjehuty, and his younger brother Kamose, first
learning to read and write Hieratic - the cursive form of hieroglyphs used in
daily life - before moving on to study the sacred hieroglyphs that cover temple
and tomb walls. Years later, as an adult, he marries his sisters, ensuring that
the royal bloodline stays within a select, small group, and elevates Inhapy to
the position of Great Royal Wife.

1558 BC, Thebes.

King Senakhtenre Tao I dies and is buried in a simple
shaft cut into the rock at Dra Abu el-Naga on the Theban west bank; ceremonial
daggers and intricate amulets accompany him to the grave, and his funerary
chapel, constructed above the shaft, is topped by a steep-sided pyramid, and fronted
by a pair of obelisks. From the time of his father's death to the royal
funeral, Tao refrains from shaving and cutting his hair, in line with Egyptian
custom, and on the day of the final funerary rites, performs the 'opening of
the mouth' ceremony on his father's mummy, revivifying it. Shortly afterwards,
his coronation ceremony is held; as each crown is placed upon Tao's head, his
physical body fuses with the divine spirit of kingship, raising him from the
human sphere to become intermediary between mankind and the gods. At the culmination
of the rites, he receives his throne name - Seqenenre.

Unlike his predecessors,
Seqenenre is uncomfortable living in a country half-occupied by enemies; his
great predecessors had been kings of Upper and
Lower Egypt, after all, not just the Theban region. His thoughts turn to
war. First, he begins to develop his naval fleet, in preparation for the army's
northward journey along the Nile into enemy territory. Next, he orders the
construction of a fortress at Deir el-Ballas, 40km north of Thebes, complete
with an observation tower and palace. A contingent of Kerma Nubians are
stationed there; these renowned fighters had formed an integral part of Egypt's
war machine for over a thousand years. In the coming war, he knows he can count
on their skills.

Finally, the time is ready to
strike.

From this moment, the details of Seqenenre's war are lost to history.

Rethinking Seqenenre's Death

July 2009, Cairo.

I continue to stare into the mummy's vacant
eye sockets. I lean forward, and bring my face closer to the glass. Ever since
Maspero unwrapped Seqenenre's mummy, scholars have speculated on how the king
received the deathly blows to his head. The major theories, however, haven't
changed since these early investigations: Maspero argued that he'd been slain
in battle,while Smith argued that
he was assassinated sleeping in his palace. In recent years, scholars have,
however, proven that the shape of the wounds in Seqenenre's head match certain
weapons: the long wound to the upper forehead fits an Egyptian battleaxe, but
the one to the left cheek and above the right eye perfectly matches a Hyksos-style
weapon. The blow to the nose could have been the made by the blunt end of an
axe or a mace, and the injury below the left ear was probably a dagger or
spear. Thanks to this additional information, it seems certain that the king was
set upon by a group of attackers; a group that certainly included the Hyksos,
and perhaps Egyptians too.

So did Seqenenre die on the battlefield or at the hands of assassins?

The team that identified the
weapons that killed Seqenenre also adapted Maspero's battlefield theory in
light of their new findings. Based on the angles of attack, they figured that
Seqenenre had been knocked from his chariot in the heat of battle and received
the final blows while lying on the ground. Since the 1970s, this particular interpretation
has been repeated many times in the scholarly literature. But does it hold up
to scrutiny?

Is this how Seqenenre died?

The problems with the
established theories are manifold. First and foremost, it's unlikely that a man
of Seqenenre's size would be killed entirely by blows to the head in the heat
of battle, without a single blow to the rest of his body. There's also no
evidence that the Egyptians under Seqenenre had access to chariots. And, even
if Seqenenre did have a chariot, it's unlikely that he'd charge at his enemies
straight on; chariots were used to ride along the enemy front line, firing
arrows at high speed from a safe distance. It could be argued that Seqenenre's
body was protected by armour, leaving only his head vulnerable to the deadly
blows, but the Egyptians didn't wear body armour before the Eighteenth Dynasty.
The king was protected at all times, however, by his royal bodyguard. Even when
hunting, the king's prey were herded into a ditch behind a barrier, so that he and
his followers could take aim in safety. If the Egyptians went to such great
lengths to protect their king at home, he probably wouldn't have been free to
wander the battlefield. Furthermore, my own research has shown it to be
unlikely that the pharaohs ever personally led their troops into battle;
instead they probably remained at a safe distance from danger.

As for Smith's assassination
theory, although intriguing, there is little to back it up. Smith believed that
two and quite possibly four of the wounds to Seqenenre's head could have been inflicted when the king was
lying down, but, recent studies have shown that many of the wounds could
equally have been inflicted when he was standing, and even so, he could have
been knocked down before receiving the rest. In the absence of any evidence for
palace intrigue, it seems far-fetched to create a scenario in which a group of
men armed with a mixture of Hyksos and Egyptian weaponry entered the royal
bedchamber, and, in a rather dramatic show of care and attention, proceeded only
to attack Seqenenre's face, carefully avoiding touching any other part of his
body.

To me, the only explanation to
fully explain the king dying on the battlefield yet not in the thick of battle,
unable to defend himself or without his personal guard to defend him, and with
a particular focus being on the face, is ceremonial execution, no doubt at the
hands of the victorious Hyksos general. A death that could have been inflicted
in controlled circumstances.

The mummy stares back at me.

The Death of King Seqenenre Tao

1553 BC, Hyksos territory.

The Egyptian king kneels, his arms tied
behind his back. He stares blankly ahead, deliberately avoiding the eyes of his
captor. The Hyksos general knows he has a special prize: an Egyptian king. He
makes a spectacle, showing off his capture, relishing in the cheers of his
battle-worn and bloodied troops. Seqenenre knows what is to come and readies
himself for the afterlife.

Standing in front of the
kneeling Seqenenre, the Hyksos general raises his axe, a traditional weapon of
the Asiatic elite with a long thin blade that flares out at its tip, and holds
it steady. In an instant, it cuts through the air, powered by muscle and
gravity, and enters Seqenenre's forehead just above his right eye. It slices with
ease through his skull, cracking and splintering its thin surface, to penetrate
the coating of his brain, before sinking deep into his grey matter. Seqenenre's
world turns black. The ferocious jeers of his opponents, so loud moments
earlier, fall to a dull whisper. The Hyksos general wrenches his axe free from
Seqenenre's skull, freeing pieces of bone along with it. Brain matter spills
from the wound. The crowd cheer at the bloody spectacle. Seqenenre falls to his
back, twitching. He feels the cold earth beneath his face, its black soil is a
symbol of resurrection. He exhales for the last time.

The Hyksos general brings his axe
down a second time, perforating Seqenenre's left cheek, destroying the bone.
Finally it is time for his coup de grace.
Turning his axe around, he raises the blunt end of its handle into the air,
and, gaining maximum momentum, brings its crashing into the centre of
Seqenenre's face, imitating the age-old image of the smiting pharaoh.
Seqenenre's nose is crushed, his right eye socket fractures; his bloodied
broken face is almost unrecognizable.

Fulfilled, the Hyksos general leaves
Seqenenre's body where it lies and returns to his command tent. His deputy, a
loyal Egyptian vassal, approaches with his own axe. Wanting to associate
himself with this great victory, he plunges it deep into Seqenenre's forehead,
leaving a long fracture in the skull; the crowd cheer again, and he kicks the
pharaoh over to lie prone in the dirt, face down in a pool of his own blood. As
a final insult, a soldier plunges his spear into the king's neck, just below
the left ear. The spectacle over, the crowd departs; the Hyksos have proven
their dominance.

The king is dead.

For the full scholarly
report on my research into Seqenenre Tao's death, please refer to my article,
'The Death of Seqenenre Tao,' in The Journal of the American
Research Center in Egypt 45 (2009), pp.
159-176.